WEBVTT
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Thank you.
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The last talk was about
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electronic technology
and enhancing the brain.
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My talk's about an old technology
enhancing the brain;
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an old technology
that of course, you all know and love,
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and that's called drugs.
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But I'll come to that in a minute.
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I'm going to start with the brain
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because it's the most complex
and evolved element
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in the whole universe.
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It's what got you here today,
and hopefully, will get you home tonight.
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A single mouse brain has
more computing power
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than all the computers on Earth today.
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Your brains are at least
a million times more powerful.
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But unfortunately, it can go wrong.
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Over the last few years,
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we've discovered the scale of problems
that brain disorders produce.
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The sum total of illness and cost
to society from brain disorders
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is greater than that from cancer,
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cardio-vascular disease,
and diabetes put together.
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You see on the graph there
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it's the equivalent each year
to nearly 800 billion euros.
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It is if we're paying off
the Greek debt every year
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in the burden of illness
produced by brain disorders.
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We know that investment in these disorders
is not matching the enormous burden.
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Here, you can see
on the left hand graph, the red circle;
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'brain disorders' are way outside
the predicted line of investment.
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They're the largest disability,
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and the investment is
disproportionately low.
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On the right-hand side, you can see
one of the reasons for this.
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You can see the attrition rate for drugs
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that go through discovery
into development.
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Look at the second cylinder there.
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You can see that from
200 Alzheimer's drugs in development,
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only one reaches the clinic.
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The brain is
a very difficult organ to treat.
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Why does the brain go wrong?
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It goes wrong
because of external influences:
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malnutrition, still a big problem;
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parental and other abuse
- psychological and physical -;
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toxins - particularly alcohol.
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These are images of my own research
showing a normal brain at the top
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and a brain severely damaged
by alcohol misuse lower down.
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Infections such as meningitis,
encephalitis are still common,
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and trauma is a massive problem
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in terms of leading
to long-term brain damage
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particularly in young men.
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And then, there are internal aspects
of the brain development
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that can go wrong:
related conditions like autism.
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You can have acquired
abnormalities like epilepsy
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and there are age-related changes
such as dementia.
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But the real focus of my talk today
is how the brain limits itself
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and how we can perhaps expand its capacity
or take away the limit it puts on itself.
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Your brain is most flexible
when you're a baby.
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Some people would argue
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that the whole process of education
is about taking away flexibility
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and forcing every one of you
to think and behave in the same way.
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It's about getting conformity of process
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which of course is useful
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if you're trying to speak a language
the same way as other people,
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but may not be useful
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if it limits how you can deal with
other things such as problems.
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And also, the constraining of the brain
in itself can lead to problems;
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if there is not enough of it
in the right place,
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you get disorders
such as ADHD and schizophrenia.
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If you get excessive constraints,
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you can end up with disorders
like OCD and addiction.
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And also the resilience
in the brain can be impaired,
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and that will lead to disorders
such as anxiety and depression.
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The core of my talk really is showing you
how we can now understand
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the limitations that the brain
constrains the mind with
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through using drugs.
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This research really goes back
to the 1950s
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and the personal experience
of this man, Aldous Huxley,
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who used peyote and used
LSD, psychedelic drugs,
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to understand his mind.
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He wrote about it in the book
"The Doors of Perception,"
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and he used this quote from William Blake
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to explain how these drugs
changed his mind.
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He said, "If the doors
of perception were cleansed,
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everything would appear
to man as it is, Infinite.
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For man has closed himself up
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till he sees all things through
narrow chinks of his cavern."
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And Huxley realized
that what psychedelics do
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is take away this phenomenon
that he inferred
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which is that "the brain is
an instrument for focusing the mind."
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Modern neuroscience
has shown they were right.
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Because, what we now know
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is that the brain creates
what the mind thinks it's doing.
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Here is an example of vision.
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You might be looking out
at a glorious sunset,
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but in reality, the light rays
go into your retina
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and are transformed
into a series of electrical impulses
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which pass into parts in your brain.
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And those parts of the brain
reconstruct an image
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that they think you're seeing.
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And that image, in the words of Blake,
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is seeing through the constraints,
the chinks of the cavern
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that your brain puts on it.
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And if you have mental illness
- for instance, depression or addiction -
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then what you see is also
constrained by your brain.
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So depressed people don't see
even the brightness of the sky.
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They see a dull grey.
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And of course, people with addiction
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when they see through
the chinks of their cavern,
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they simply see the drugs
that they're addicted to.
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Psychedelic drugs
take away that limitation.
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They allow the mind to work
in a much more flexible way.
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This is our research using psilocybin
in magic mushroom juice.
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Those two images contain
the same number of connections.
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But on the left-hand image, under placebo,
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you see that most of the connections
are around the edge.
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The brain talks to itself
in regional ways.
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But under psilocybin,
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there's a massive cross-talk,
much more integration;
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parts of the brain which haven't talk
to each other since you were children
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are able to engage.
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And that's how people can get new insights
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and also, potentially overcome damage
of dysfunction of the brain.
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Here is another study using LSD
showing essentially the same thing.
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On the left-hand side,
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you see the visual cortex is
normally very local in how it works.
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But under LSD,
when people have their eyes closed,
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they can see enormously vivid,
interesting sets of images.
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And that's because the brain is
much more interconnected under LSD
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than normal.
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Here you see that the visual cortex
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connects to most of the rest
of the brain in that state.
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We've been able to utilize this liberation
of processing of the brain,
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produced by psychedelics,
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to treat people with depression.
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Here is a study published last year
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where we took people with depression
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who failed two previous
anti-depressive treatments,
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and also had failed psychotherapy.
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They were given
a single dose of psilocybin,
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and you can see there, that a week later,
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all of them had recovered to some extend,
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and half of them were now
in a state of remission.
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They were in the yellow bar there,
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which shows that their depression
has actually gone away.
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And that's not the first evidence
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that psychedelics have therapy
or have therapeutic uses.
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We also have evidence
from around the world
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that psilocybin can be useful in helping
people deal with alcohol dependence,
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with smoking dependence,
with obsessive compulsive disorder.
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And most recently,
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two major studies showing
it can help people come to terms
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with the anxiety and the depression
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which almost always accompany
a diagnosis of a terminal illness.
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So, these drugs can have
potentially enormous opportunities
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for helping people deal
with mental distress.
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It's not just psychedelics
that can have that potential.
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Many illegal drugs have medical uses.
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So for non-psychedelics
such as MDMA, ecstasy,
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where there is good evidence
in post-traumatic stress disorder
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and also some studies
going on in addiction.
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And of course, there is cannabis
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where we have a range
of different disorders
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from pain, spasticity, cancer, epilepsy,
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inflammatory diseases,
and also sleep disorders.
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All of these, potentially, are amenable
to treatment with cannabis.
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So, why don't we use these drugs?
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That's because the WHL and the UN
have said they are too dangerous,
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which is certainly untrue.
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I can tell you categorically
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none of our patients died
in the experiments we did on them.
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Most of our governments
perpetuate this lie.
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And many of us - hopefully, not you -
have closed minds.
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We do not want to believe
that these might have therapeutic utility.
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So I want to say to you now,
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surely now: you, if not everyone,
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should accept the fact
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that these drugs potentially
could be very important medicines.
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For the sake of the millions of people
in the world who could be helped,
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it's time to say there should be no limits
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to the therapeutic research
we do with these drugs.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)